Automate SFTP per department using a VARA for predefined destination.

Hi All,We receive email requests from several departments to have files sent to remote locations / vendors, which is currently performed manually using Ipswitch or Filezilla. My thought is to create a shared folder for each department and have a job poll the folders. When a file is dropped, a VARA would be used to get the files destination based on the name of the file, then an ftp job would transmit the file. This process would run all day freeing up a lot of time and resources. This would essentially be a self service process.

Has anyone setup a process similar to this or do you have a better more efficient way of accomplishing with task?

Yes, we have something like this. I will not go into much detail because our solution has grown rather bloated over the years. But this can be done in Automic, using native JOBS or any scriptable client such as ftp/scp etc.

What's your platform? General tips I have for such projects: If your transfers run over SSH, look into using rsync. Saves a bunch of time, bandwidth and headaches especially for synchronizing larger data sets with remote places. If you need ftp and are on some UNIX-like platform, look into lftp. It's much better than the rest.

Thank you for the reply. We are running a windows environment and using SFTP - Ipswitch for file transfers. We want to stop using the 3rd party software and use RA_FTP exclusively going forward. The idea is to keep the entire file transfer process within Automic. Additionally I am looking at 7zip to eliminate pkzip, which we are using command line in a batch file, Again a third party application. I'm not sure is 7zip will work in v11.2, still researching.

To be frank, among the admins we discussed phasing it out, but probably won't purely because a few users are used to building jobs with it.

From an administrative perspective - well, it works, mostly. But we don't consider it great. We had issues with it not supporting new cypher suites for SSH/SCP due to an older version of the RA agent using older Java libraries. While that got solved with a new version within reasonable time, at some point we got several incompatible bits of information regarding the upgrade process of the RA agent - specificially about how the whole RA framework and RA solution bits can (or can not) go together. So personally I'd rather use some more wide spread external client and call it from the AE. I generally have more confidence in tools that are under more scrutiny, and have wider use than the Automic RA agent, especially when it comes to security sensitive operations like encrypted remote transfers.

As Wolfgang already said, 7zip is no problem, and in fact any automatable command line tool that honors stdin/stdout and requires no interactive input to do it's work should work just fine.

RA-FTP is an addon to the Automic product, and doesn't always behave the way other Automic objects do. We have found that when we run an RA-FTP from a workflow or schedule, its settings are *always* overridden by the parent object, even if you don't want them to. And yes, sometimes you can open an RA-FTP, save changes, and come back later and find your changes were lost.

Once we get our RA-FTPs working, we consider them to be brittle and not to be changed. When an important change comes up, we sometimes build a new RA-FTP from scratch to make sure it doesn't "remember" any of the old settings.

We do have RA-FTPs that accept their path and file name rules dynamically via passed variables. Your solution would work well with this technique.